Ulrike Meinhof

Ulrike Meinhof (1934 - 1976) was a German radical leftist terrorist who started out as a journalist. She was one of the founders of the Red Army Faction (German: Rote Armee Fraktion) which is also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. Captured in 1972, she was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for some of her crimes and hanged herself in her cell in 1976 while on trial for more crimes. (A small minority of people have alleged she was actually killed by the state, and this was covered up.)

Early on, she became involved in the anti-nuclear movement[?] and was an editor for the radical left paper Konkret. She married Klaus Rainer Röhl[?], a communist, in 1961 and had twin girls, Bettina and Regine, on September 21, 1962. Divorced in 1968, she became involved with more radical people in Berlin. In 1970, she helped Andreas Baader to escape from prison and then took part in bank robberies and bombings of industrial sites and American military bases. The group was quickly dubbed "The Baader-Meinhof Gang" by the conservative German press, even though Meinhof was probably not leader of the group. Meinhof wrote many of the tracts and manifestos that the group produced, decrying what she called the exploitation of the common man and the imperialism of the capitalist system. During the 1980s, much of the work of the Red Army Faction was supported by the Stasi, the security and intelligence organization of communist East Germany.